John Kerry actually uttered the word "secular" in talking about Syria the other day. Imagine: he basically is saying that US and its Qatari and Saudi and UAE allies are working to replicate the secularism of Wahhabi Saudi regime in Syria. Good luck.

"SANA’A - The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) is deeply concerned about the dire food security situation in the city of Taiz in southern Yemen where a lack of humanitarian access has left tens of thousands of people without food assistance for more than a month."

"Evidence suggests the bombs were made at the nearby manufacturing facility of RWM Italia, a munitions company that has shipped thousands of bombs to Saudi Arabia and other armed forces bombing Yemen, as revealed in this investigation by reported.ly in June. This reporter has seen documentary evidence of bombs with RWM Italia manufacturing codes on the ground in Yemen." "Together, this evidence strongly suggests that the Italian government continues to grant licenses for the export of arms to forces bombing Yemen with horrendous consequences."

I told you this before but I went to school with the granddaughter of Hajj Amin at AUB. I even pretended I wanted to buy the car that the family was offering for sale: which was given to Hajj Amin by the Hitler regime. I went to a parking garage in Verdun and inspected the car. I remembering seeing a bullet hole in it although it was said to be an armored car. (Of course, I could not afford the car but it was nice. Also, I don't think that I would have looked cool driving the car that Hitler gave to Hajj Amin).

"The cluster munition attack was carried out at around noon on 27 October 2015 in a residential area of Ahma, approximately 10km north-west of al-Talh in Sahar directorate, near Sa’da city. Ahma is approximately 40km south of the border with Saudi Arabia. A local activist who visited the site several hours after the attack found three unexploded submunitions around 20m apart, one in the field of a local farm, another near a greenhouse and the third next to a mosque."

"Past Liberal governments have always had a pro-Israel foreign policy," "Barak told The Canadian Press on Thursday that Trudeau also has a record of unwavering support for Israel. “Mr. Trudeau has been very consistent from the very beginning of his campaign, in expressing his support for Israel,” said Barak. “I’m sure maybe the style will change,” the envoy added. “But I don’t feel there will be a change on the substance. I’m really reassured.” "Trudeau also “explained there would be a shift in tone but Canada would continue to be a friend of Israel’s,” she added." (thanks Amir)

The other things you need to be bear in mind: 1) Hitler was obviously a racist hateful anti-Arabs who described Arabs as "lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped". Hajj Amin and other Arab idiots who met with Nazi officials should have known that the Nazi regimes hated Jews and Arabs alike. 2) Hitler was never ever interested in Arab affairs and it never featured in his mind and conversation much. To be sure, only when he invaded Czechoslovakia he remembered that Britain is in occupation of Palestine. 3) As a racist, Hitler preferred British control of the Middle East. 4) Hitler still for much of the 1930s aimed at achieving British neutrality or even alliance. 5) The talk of Hitler's preference for Islam is based on the conversation cited by Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich: his invocation of the Nietzschian critique of Christianity and he said some things that Islam is a strong and forceful religion or words to that effect. It did not amount to sympathy for Islam or Muslims. Hitler was ignorant of Islamic and Arab affairs. In fact, there was one conversation in which Hitler imagined Muslim victories in Europe and speculated that Germans would have wound up dominating the world anyways because Arabs are too incapable (it reminds me of Charlie Manson's theory of race wars in the US). 6) the knowledgeable German government expert on the Middle East, F. Grobba, succeeded in camouflaging or suppressing in Arabic the racist anti-Arab discourse of the Nazi regime. 7) Hajj Amin did read whatever trash that was written to him by Nazi officials in German broadcasts to the Arab world but it is significant that Hajj Amin did not engage in Nazi genocidal anti-Semitic rhetoric when he wrote or spoke to Arabs directly--I think that the Islamic stance about people of the book would have put him in an embarrassing position despite Nazi propaganda efforts to cite (often out of context) the anti-Jewish references in Islamic texts.

"Saudi Arabia’s new research centre on Wahhabism, set to open on the edge of the capital Riyadh, looks fitting for a branch of Islam considered inflexible, intolerant and unchanging. Here, King Salman, monarch of the world’s biggest oil exporter, has a turreted palace overlooking the crumbled mud brick homes of his ancestors now undergoing preservation. And it was here that Abdul Wahhab’s partnership with a contemporary local chief, Imam Mohammed bin Saud, laid the foundations for today’s kingdom and its reliance on the sheikh’s 270-year-old teachings.

Although the heart of the 750-million-riyal ($200-million/179-million-euro) project will be Atturaif, the adjacent Abdul Wahhab Foundation is designed to honour the sheikh’s role as co-founder of the state and tell “the truth” about his intellectual heritage, Arrakban said."(thanks Basim)

I don't think that we should be dragged into a discussion of the fool, Hajj Amin Husayni. But the entire discussion about him (in the West and East) has become burned by vulgar and crude Zionist propaganda. I wrote an article about the matter in Arabic for today's Al-Akhbar so I will just summarize key points. 1) The propaganda about Hajj Amin has only been intensifying: not motivated by history but by the desire to besmirch and stigmatize the Palestinian people and their just cause. Netanyahu is borrowing from the body of propaganda trash literature produced by Zionists. With ness this book by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz: Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. It says on page 6: "After their (Hajj Amin and Hitler) meeting, they concluded the pact of Jewish genocide in Europe and the Middle East, and immediately afterwards, Hitler gave the orders to prepare for the Holocaust". The worst part is that this trash was published by Yale University Press. I mean, we have a record of the meeting and there was no discussion of the Holocaust and Hajj Amin discussed very specific political matters, and he typically asked for support but he was too dumb to realize that Nazi government was not in any way interested in lending a hand to the Arab people. In his definitive biography of Hiter, Ian Kershaw does not even mention Hajj Amin once in his massive book. Not once. Notice in the Zionist historiography, Alfred Rosenberg, the real anti-Semitic genocidal "thinker" of the Nazi regime, and the one who had an impact on the hateful mind of Hitler, takes a back seat to Hajj Amin. Look at this reference in Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the rise of Radical Islam by David Dalin and John Rothmann about Hajj Amin's days in Berlin: "As the Mufti was driven down the Wilhelmstrasse, adoring crowds of Palestinian Arab expatriates lined the streets to cheer and pay homage to their revered leader, the Grossmufti von Jerusalem". (p. 5). Adoring crowds of Palestinian Arab expatriates in Berlin? How many of them were there? 3 to 4 Palestinians exactly? Worse, notice that Hajj Amin becomes Hitler's Mufti. Pretty soon Zionist fabricators will render it like this: Hitler will become Mufti's Hitler. All these writings are really Nazi apologia of the likes you see in the writings of David Irving and other Holocaust deniers. 2) Hajj Amin was not the only Arab who met his Hitler or Nazi leaders because he was the enemy of the enemies of the Arabs in the Arab East. Shakir Arsalan also met with Nazi leaders and established relations with the Nazi regime. (Read the account in William Cleveland about the relationship between Arsalan and Nazi leaders although Cleveland makes it clear that Arsalan was less corrupt financially than Hajj Amin who kept asking the Germans for more funding in his fancy dwelling in Berlin. In fact, Arsalan prepared perhaps the first comprehensive Arabic translations of Mein Kampf but it was never published (see Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World by Jeffrey Herf, p. 42). We don't know if a manuscript still exist and why the Nazis never used it. Is it because Fritz Grobba (a key Middle East expert at the German government) warned of how Arabs will see the racism against them in the book? Not sure. Palestinian leader, Musa Alami, also met with German officials although we don't have a record of the meeting and Alami never mentions the matter in Musa Alami: Palestine is My Country: the Story of Musa Alami. But the worst meeting by an Arab official and Hitler is by far the official representative of King Abdul-`Aziz, Khalid Al-Hud Gargani. We have a record of the meeting: that was an Arab who basically discussed genocidal anti-Semitic plans with Hitler. The man even compared Hitler to Muhammad and told him that his battle against Jews is not different from the battle between Muhammad and Jews of Medina. King `Abdul-`Aziz wanted to pursue a relationship with Hitler but was impeded by 1) his subservience to the British; 2) his desire to have one of his sons become King of Jordan and he wanted British support for that. 4) Arabs have been largely misled by Zionist propaganda which led many to think that Hitler was a friend of the Arabs and foe of Zionism. Not true at all. The Nazi regime in fact pursued a Zionist policy in the Middle East and supported the creation of Jewish state before it was formed (Rosenberg was the only raising a stink about that given his firm belief in the trashy Protocols of the Elders of Zion). As Nicosia pointed out in The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, Hitler overruled his aids even after 1937 Peel Commission when Britain made it clear that it was pursuing a Jewish state in Palestine and called for continued support of Jewish immigration into Palestine. Nazi regime even indulged Zionist organizations in Germany because both were working for the flight of Jews into Palestine. People in West and East miss a key aspect about Nazism: that its anti-Semitism was consistent with its Zionism: and that is true of many Western Zionists, including US and British officials and even southern Baptists of the US. In one speech from 1920, Hitler said: "Jews should seek their human rights in their own state in Palestine, where they belong" (p. 28 in Nicosia). Hajj Amin is guilty of ignorance and stupidity among other political sins. I can go on but just wanted to share this. And the Havana Transfer Agreement has been discussed in the literature. If we rightly speak of (and against) appeasement to Hitler, the Zionists were clearly among those appeasers. 4) Zionist movement and later state tried hard to extract "confessions" from Nazi officials after war to basically admit that indeed Hajj Amin was the guy who founded the Nazi ideology and regime. They tried so hard with Eichamann to get a confirmation and were very disappointed with his mention that he met him once in passing. As for the constant references to Eichamann's deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, of course, he was more than willing in Nuremberg to basically say that it was not Hitler or the German Nazi were were responsible but that Hajj Amin did it all. OK, I shall stop.

This is an amazing story. One silly female TV presenter in the Sisi media apparatus basically mocked and blamed a female victim of sexual harassment. What happens next is most gratifying: Bassem Youssef with more than 5 million followers on Twitter used his power to pressure advertisers to pull out of her program. They all followed and the TV station wound up apologizing and stopping the program and even pulling out all videos from Youtube. Kudos to Bassem Youssef on this one.

"About half the Palestinians killed were suspected assailants who were fatally shot at the scene of attacks. Others were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and along Israel’s border with Gaza." So one half were terrorists, while "others" were killed in "clashes". That can only mean one thing and one thing alone: that Israel is blameless.

"Kerem Oktem, a Turkish historian and author of “Angry Nation: Turkey Since 1989,” described the deep state as “a loose network of manipulative actors” who “do the dirty jobs of government.” In a classified diplomatic cable from 2002 released by WikiLeaks, W. Robert Pearson, who was then the American ambassador in Ankara, wrote that “the Turkish Deep State, the behind-the-scenes machinery and power relationships among selected members of the military, judicial, and bureaucratic elite, has endured as an essential factor in political life, and in citizens’ wary calculations of their relationship to the state.” The cable, which described how journalists were suspected of disseminating propaganda for agents of the deep state, relied in part on a source in Turkey’s security establishment."

"It is a stupefying display of favoritism towards Israel from the BBC’s director of television, a man whose job supposedly demands impartiality." "Shockingly, he is not the only senior figure at the BBC known for pro-Israel sympathies." (thanks Amir)

"a member of the board of directors of the YMCA, Jerusalem. He has written extensively on Arab culture and politics, including an International Herald Tribuneop-ed he co-authored with Washington Institute executive director Robert Satloff titled “Why Palestinians Should Learn About the Holocaust.”"

Sheldon S. Wolin died. There are no political scientists like him anymore.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

"Mogtaderi explained, “Before he assaulted me, the assailant was arguing that the killing and torture of Palestinian children is justified. When he realized I was recording our conversation, he slapped the phone out of my hand. I reached for the phone back, and he shoved me hard multiple times. Eventually the crowd convinced him to return the phone and he left. I went to health services to be treated for injuries to my back. It was disturbing.” "

"As documented in our report - The Palestine Exception to Free Speech - Palestine Legal responded to nearly 300 incidents of suppression in 2014-15, over a third of which took place in California." "Over the past few weeks, we responded to a spate of incidents including a physical assault and death threats against students expressing support for Palestinian rights."

"Saudi Arabia has used British and American weaponry to help Bahrain quash unarmed protesters in 2011, and is now using its sophisticated weaponry against impoverished Yemeni civilians. Yet only last month, the British government invited the country to its London arms fair. “There’s almost nothing the Saudis could do to stop British sales,” Smith said. Arms dealers often receive implicit support from Western governments, and can travel the planet often without facing prosecution."

"Egypt’s becoming more energy-independent could sidetrack efforts — backed by the United States — to use energy diplomacy to improve relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors." "But Egypt’s good fortune could come at the expense of its much richer neighbor. Eni’s trove could threaten Israel’s ambitions to tap its own giant offshore gas field, called Leviathan." "With Zohr, they fear, Egypt might no longer see a need for the Leviathan gas. “If we continue to procrastinate,” Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli energy minister, told Parliament in September, “it is possible there will no longer be a need for Israeli gas in Egypt and Jordan.” "

"Civilians caught up in South Sudan’s civil war were forced to drink the blood or eat the flesh of people from other ethnic groups by armed groups backing the president and his former rival, an African Union report has found." "Published on Wednesday, it recorded “widespread and systematic atrocities” suffered by people because of their ethnicity and carried out across the world’s newest country, which was formed after breaking away from Sudan in 2011. Among the crimes committed, it said, were “murder, rape and sexual violence, torture and other inhumane acts of comparable gravity”," (thanks Amir)

"Lebanese authorities detained five Saudi citizens at Beirut international airport on Monday after finding two tonnes of drugs aboard a private jet bound for the Gulf kingdom, security sources and the National News Agency said."

"Five suspects were detained Monday after police at Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport discovered a large quantity of captagon pills aboard a private jet preparing to fly out of Lebanon. A security source told The Daily Star that police foiled an attempt to smuggle two tons of captagon to an Arab country. Police arrested five people and launched an investigation in coordination with the competent judicial authority to unveil the circumstances of the operation."

As soon as the Saudi regime (backed by the US and other Western allies) succeeded in "liberating" Aden (used to be one of the most progressive cities in the Arab world especially under glorious socialist rule), the University of Science and Technology there announced that classes will now take place according to this gender schedule: one week for men and another week for women, as long as the two don't mix.

Imagine if this was a son of an Iranian or Syrian official: in that case, all Western correspondents based in Beirut would have filed long stories about the matter with interviews of foes of Iran and Syria in Lebanon. I received this from a TV producer of a major American network:"Hi As’ad,

A Lebanese journalist just told me how minimum is the coverage of the western media based in Beirut of the story of the Saudi prince arrested in Beirut , only Foreign policy and AFP did the story from all the western media based in Beirut ,

The journalist told me imagine if there is Hezbollah operative arrested with two tons in the airport , it will be all over with all kind of stories , mujhaed add more info

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

"Over the past few years Western media’s negative coverage of the Arab Gulf states has increased so much that it is starting to look more like a rite of passage for some journalists and news organisations. Meanwhile, what’s notable is that most Western media outlets have softened their tone when reporting on Iran." This is a silly contention I am used to reading in Saudi media but how can you, Sultan, make it? Who on earth will believe that Western media are soft on Iran and harsh on Saudi Arabia? You remind me of the nutty CAMERA organization which access US media of being pro-Palestinian. And then you reduce the problems that humanity has with GCC regimes to image: "That said, there’s no question that the GCC struggles with image perceptions"? Image problems? Domestic workers, repression of women, ruling dynasties, dynastic monopoly of natural resources, under the table alliances with Israel, all that is an "image problem"? Subservience to Western powers is an image problems? Beheading is an image problem? Inability to voice a mild criticisms of rulers is an image problem? Creating empty consultative assemblies to deceive citizens is an image problem? Personalty cult around the corrupt rulers is an image problem?

"The UK Government has been condemned for encouraging defence firms to showcase hardware including covert surveillance devices, armoured cars and electronic riot gear, at a security show in the United Arab Emirates, where police have been accused of brutally suppressing dissent." "The event comes after authorities in the country, which have dismayed campaigners by seeking re-election to an influential UN body on human rights this week, were accused of imprisoning hundreds of rape victims, including pregnant women and domestic servants."

From a reader: ""The Palestinian Health Ministry said that 61 including 14 children; Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the beginning of this month."

"Israeli and American teams are putting together a plan to increase annual U.S. military aid to Israel by as much as $1 billion, on top of the current $3.1 billion, a source close to the military aid process said Wednesday."

"A South Carolina high school student who witnessed her classmate being physically abused by a school resource officer was arrested and held on $1,000 for filming the incident. Niya Kenny, 18, told WLTX she was shocked and disturbed when she saw Officer Ben Fields flipping her female classmate out of her desk and pinning her to the ground for refusing to leave class." (thanks Amir)

"A hospital in northern Yemen run by Doctors Without Borders was destroyed by warplanes belonging to a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, even though the coalition had been given the coordinates of the hospital, the relief organization said Tuesday."

"Senior defense officials said Tuesday that it was "outrageous" that female guards at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are barred from transporting five detainees suspected of being involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. A military judge issued an order in January prohibiting female guards from transporting the defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after they refused to meet with defense lawyers and complained that any physical contact with unrelated women violated their Muslim beliefs." (thanks Basim)

"Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes in Yemen, conducted with U.S. assistance, are alleged to have killed at least 1,500 civilians, dividing members of the Obama administration over whether the U.S. risks being accused of abetting war crimes in a bombing campaign that could ultimately strengthen Islamist militants." Some in the White House believe that killing 1,500 civilians are in US interest while others say it is not. A healthy debate indeed.

Do you know that most Arabic press was under strict orders to not mention that a Saudi prince was arrested while trying to smuggle some 2 tons of illegal drugs from Beirut airport aboard his private jet? Some Lebanese media didn't mention a word about it (like the Hariri Future media, TV and newspaper) while Al-Jumhuriyyah of Ilyas Murr mentioned that some "Saudis" were arrested. Only Yemeni, Tunisian and Lebanese press mentioned.

"Now we have a virtual admission from the Saudis that they are arming a group that centrally includes al Qaeda, while the U.S. itself has at least indirectly done the same (just as was true in Libya). And we’re actually at the point where western media outlets are vehemently denouncing Russia for bombing al Qaeda elements, which those outlets are manipulatively referring to as “non-ISIS groups.” It’s not a stretch to say that the faction that provides the greatest material support to al Qaeda at this point is the U.S. and its closest allies."

"Israeli occupation forces have killed six Palestinians since Saturday, including three in Hebron on Monday. One was a 17-year-old schoolgirl. The latest deaths brings the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip this month to 60. At least 15 have been under 18 years old."

"In all, HISG operated in more than 30 countries, significantly funded by the Pentagon. According to former employees, public records, and HISG’s former website, the nonprofit conducted disaster relief; provided food, medical supplies, and clothing; and helped start small businesses in countries including Niger, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, and China." "But behind all the global charity work was an ulterior motive for military officials: The longer HISG operated and became more legitimate, the more opportunities would be available to U.S. military and intelligence officials to run operations in other countries as they had in North Korea." (thanks Amir)

Ever since I came to the US I took it upon myself to read the trash books on the Middle East, which are more often than not written by ardent Zionists (of course, some trash books are written by pro-Arab writers--i.e. pro Gulf regimes writers). One such book is Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David Dalin and John Rothmann (one is a fellow at Hoover institution of war-and-more-war and the other is a professor at University of San Francisco--or so he says). In the book, there are too many absurdities but two are worth mentioning: "Nasser, who often referred to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as one of his favorite books" (p. 94). This, like many other parts of the book, is utterly invented and fabricated. In fact, Zionists combed for years in all speeches and interviews of Nasser and could not find one anti-jewish reference except one interview with an Indian writer (no Arabic version of it was published to my knowledge) in which Nasser mentioned the Protocols. On Sep. 11: the authors have a whole section titled: "Hitler, Al-Husseinia, and the Terrorists of September 11".

Especially when Israelis killed far more Palestinians than Palestinians have killed Israelis: "There is broad agreement that the mufti, who helped instigate Arab pogroms against Jews in the holy land in the 1920s". Are there no limits to Zionist link Palestinians with Nazis?

But an analysis by The New York Times of tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data in this racially mixed city of 280,000 uncovered wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct.

Those same disparities were found across North Carolina, the state that collects the most detailed data on traffic stops. And at least some of them showed up in the six other states that collect comprehensive traffic-stop statistics.

Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance."

"The absurdity of France’s celebrating itself for free expression was vividly highlighted by this week’s decision from that nation’s highest court, one that is a direct assault on basic free speech rights. The French high courtupheld the criminal conviction of 12 political activists for the “crime” of advocating sanctions and a boycott against Israel as a means of ending the decades-long military occupation of Palestine. What did these French criminals do? This:

The individuals arrived at the supermarket wearing shirts emblazoned with the words: “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel.” They also handed out fliers that said that “buying Israeli products means legitimizing crimes in Gaza.”"

"On one side are supporters of a new policy that would broaden the university system’s “speech code” definition of anti-Semitism to include denials of Israel’s right to exist and blaming Israel for the hostilities in the region."

"The political influence of two of the world's biggest arms buyers is growing throughout major capitals in the world as their defense budgets continue to increase. The top five weapons importers — India, Saudi Arabia, China, the UAE and Pakistin — accounted for 33 percent of the total arms imports from 2010 to 2014, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Arms Transfer report released last week. The UAE and Saudi Arabia combined accounted for 9 percent of the total arms imports over that period, eclipsing China's 5 percent stake. During the period, 23 percent of arms transfers to the Middle East region went to Saudi Arabia and 20 percent to the UAE. The US accounted for 47 percent of total arms supplies, Russia for 12 percent and the UK for 10 percent."

"William Casey, President Reagan’s first CIA director, embraced the covert action program and took it further. He authorized printing Korans in the Uzbek language, so they could be smuggled by rebels across the Afghan border and distributed to Soviet citizens. Casey also authorized or at least turned a blind eye to guerrilla raids on Soviet territory carried out by rebels loyal to the Afghan Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. (Hekmatyar, who received arms from the CIA, is still fighting in Afghanistan against the Afghan government and the United States.)
The anti-Soviet rebellion offers one of the few cases in history where the external rousing of Muslim fighters against a non-Muslim occupying power succeeded, at least militarily. Of course, that was primarily because the Afghan resistance was indigenous and well underway before the United States and Saudi Arabia arrived to stoke it with dollars and sophisticated arms. The outcomes of American intervention in Afghanistan against the Soviets included a devastating civil war and the birth of al-Qaeda. The policy therefore can hardly be judged a strategic triumph". (thanks Kamal)

"﻿For this trip I am accompanied by senior colleagues; by Scott Atran, an academic based in France; and by Doug Stone, a retired American general who spent over two years in Iraq during the US occupation, interviewing prisoners on a daily basis." I am sure that this made the interview process quite free and independent. Is this the new trend in academia? To conduct research while accompanied by former US generals? Also, how valuable and reliable the information when extracted or delivered when prisoners are in the custody of groups who resort to torture?

It says: ""Jamal Abdul Nasser, Taha Hussain, the Batini masses (esoteric sect of Islam) such as the Ismailis, Druze, Nusayris and other zanadiqah (heretics) who die as heretics will receive painful punishment in their graves that no mortal can handle."

"Two new laws that ban communist symbols while honouring nationalist groups that collaborated with the Nazis have come into effect in Ukraine, raising concerns that Kiev could be stifling free speech and further fragmenting the war-torn country in the rush to break ties with its Soviet past."

"Since the start of last year’s Gaza war, there have been several incidents of anti-leftist violence to go along with the attacks aimed at Palestinians: Left-wing protesters were assaulted at antiwar demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Haifa last summer, during the war; left-wing journalist Gideon Levy of Haaretz was accused of treason by a Knesset member, a crime that during wartime is punishable by death. He’s since hired bodyguards. The comedian Orna Banai lost an advertising job after an interview in which she expressed horror over Israeli actions against Palestinians. This month, people in Afula attacked an Arab correspondent for an Israeli TV network and his Jewish crew while they reported on a stabbing attack. A new bill in the Knesset encourages the thought police by turning away visitors to Israel who have supported the movement to boycott companies profiting from the occupation. On Friday, a masked Jewish settler attacked the president of leftist group Rabbis for Human Rights in a Palestinian olive grove in the West Bank."

This book was published by Saudi regime and is still in circulation since the 1970s. In it, Shi`ites are described as: "apes", "pigs", "apostates", Jews (this is considered an insult for Wahhabi clerics and their Saudi sponsors), "asses", "defectors", "deceivers", "agitators", "manicheans"(also considered an insult by Wahhabi clerics), "tails", "dogs of fire", "human dogs", "cows" and agitators.

"Founded in the United States, JDL militants were convicted of a string of bombing attacks, and are thought to be behind the 1985 assassination of Palestinian American civil rights activist Alex Odeh. The group was listed in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual terrorism report for 2001. Although its Israeli affiliate was eventually banned, the JDL is still active and legal in France, Canada and the UK."

"US presidential candidates have been invited to participate in the first-ever US Presidential Candidates' Forum held abroad, focusing on foreign and defense policy issues. From Jerusalem, Israel, each presidential candidate will have an opportunity to present their views on U.S. foreign policy, US-Israel relations,"

"The number of people killed when U.S. forces bombed a trauma hospital in northern Afghanistan earlier this month has risen to 30, the international medical charity Doctors Without Borders, which ran the clinic, said on Sunday. The death toll includes “10 known patients, 13 known staff and seven unrecognizable bodies,” the organization said in a statement." (thanks Amir)

"A Lebanese official says Beirut airport authorities have foiled one of the country's largest drug smuggling attempts, seizing two tons of amphetamine Captagon pills before they were loaded onto the private plane of a Saudi prince." (thanks Amir)

"There have been calls to kill attackers in every situation, in defiance of the law or any accepted rules of engagement for the military. Lapid, for example, said in an interview, “Don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him.” Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan also gave his blessing to that notion. And the head of the Jerusalem police department, Moshe Edri, announced, “Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocent people is due to be killed.” Knesset member Yinon Magal tweeted that authorities should “make an effort” to kill terrorists who carry out attacks.

The low point (so far) was last Sunday night’s lynching of 29-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker Haftom Zarhum, mistakenly identified as a perpetrator of a terrorist attack in Beersheba. Zarhum was shot by a security guard then beaten to death by a mob of passers-by in a predictable response to the incitement from our own politicians to kill as revenge. And the increasingly intolerant, boiling, racist tone of the Israeli conversation is — there is no other way to put this — a result of 48 years of occupying another people: of Israelis receiving a message (or at least understanding it as such) that we are superior to others, that we control the fate of those lesser others, that we are allowed to disregard laws and any basic notions of human morality with regard to Palestinians."

Sunday, October 25, 2015

"The Palestinian Health Ministry has reported, Saturday, that 57 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, since the beginning of this month, including 13 children and a pregnant woman, and that more than 2000 Palestinians have been injured."

"A Saudi Arabian prince is accused of a having sexual relationship with a male aide, taking cocaine and threatening to kill women who refused his advances - as well as sexually assaulting a maid – Daily Mail Online has exclusively learned. Prince Majed bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – revealed by Daily Mail Online yesterday to be son of the late King Abdullah – now faces an extraordinary series of allegations in a civil case brought by three female staff members of his Los Angeles mansion." "They include a claim that the royal attempted to urinate on the trio while screaming: 'I want to pee pee'." "When asked to stop, Al Saud allegedly then yelled: 'I am a prince and I do what I want. You are nobody!' " "Another says she was made to watch while a different male aide bent over and broke wind in Al Saud's face – apparently at his request."

"Gen. John F. Campbell, the American commander in Afghanistan, has appointed a two-star general from another command to conduct an independent investigation, his office said in a statement on Saturday."

"Boeing and Lockheed Martin play a pivotal role in the war in Yemen and the Saudi-led air campaign, which has contributed significantly to the civilian death toll. Saudi Arabia’s air force is using Boeing-made F-15 jets to bomb Yemen. The United Arab Emirates’ air force, a major partner in the Sunni Arab and Western coalition to restore Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power, uses Lockheed Martin-manufactured F-16 jets to strike Yemen."

"Since 1 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 50 Palestinians, including at least 10 children, across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. According to initial data from Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P), more than 100 Palestinian children have sustained injuries in that period — and the number keeps climbing." "As part of their work, attorneys with DCI-P provide advocacy and legal representation to children who have been arrested, detained, interrogated and tortured inside Israeli jails and detention centers."

"If you are in the wrong color, you have a higher chance to be harassed by policemen," says S., an Israeli feminist activist who is now under personal attacks after posting on her Facebook page about the topic. "This was true always, but with the recent wave of violence it has literally become dangerous to be of non-European roots," she adds." "The discrimination against Israelis with Arab or North African roots goes way back to the times before Israel was established."

"The U.S. constantly presents itself as the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy, but its allies are anything but. In fact, America has for many decades aligned itself with some of the most dictatorial and repressive regimes in the world: the Gulf monarchies."

"The map accurately depicts the land that has been forcibly taken from Palestinians since 1946, two years before Israel was established and the accompanying expulsion of between 750,000 and a million Palestinians to make way for a Jewish state." (thanks Amir)

The US government so casually lies to its people--forget about the rest of the world. Obama has been insistent that there are no combat troops in Iraq. Yet, a US soldier was killed in combat in Iraq this week without any pressure on the US administration to explain its deception.

This is a useful article by an expert on Ibn Taymiyyah: he argues (and he has a book length study) among other things that 1) Ibn Taymiyyah never engaged in Takfir in the manner of contemporary Jihadi Salafis; 2) that the first reliance on Ibn Taymiyyah occurred long before Al-Faridah Al-Gha'ibah.

"More broadly, we have learned – starting right here in Lebanon – that despite the dangers, America cannot withdraw from places in trouble or in chaos. It only makes the problems worse. " By the way, many Lebanese have noticed that this ambassador (who will become ambassador in Pakistan) is not very bright.

This is a good critique by a Lebanese columnist of the the Director of the Moscow office of Carnegie, and who supplies Western media with whatever they want to hear about Russia and its policies around the world. The columnist noted that he was the source for the Anne Barnard article this week about how Putin summoned Bashsahr Al-Asad to Moscow to beat him up.

If you read Nicholas Branford you can reach one conclusion: Hizbollah fighters AND commanders spend 50% of their time talking to him, and they seem quite eager to say the most damaging things about Hizbollah to him of all people--perhaps because he has a reputation for being a loyal March 14 Hariri entourage loyalty?

"According to the Financial Times, redemptions from Saudi Arabia totaling an estimated $50 billion to $70 billion (and possibly more) caught some asset management firms off guard last month, with one describing a day of large Saudi withdrawals as “our black Monday.”" (thanks Regan)

Of course, just like under the dictatorship of Ben Ali, the new Tunisia (which is under the rule of the same graduates of the Ben Ali dictatorship) Tunisia receives high praise from Western governments and the director of HRW on Twitter was even calling for foreign aid to Tunisia. You would not know from Western media is that a minister can be ousted for daring to talk openly about US ambassador's pressures on legislators. They deserve a Nobel Prize in chemistry now.

"The activist, Zainab al-Khawaja, who turned 32 on Wednesday, ripped up a picture of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa during a court hearing related to charges that she insulted the monarch in exactly the same way in 2012." "Writing on her popular @AngryArabiya Twitter feed that year, Ms. Khawaja defended the act of ripping up the picture as a legitimate form of peaceful protest against the monarchy. I believe tearing up pictures of a criminal dictator is a legitimate method of peaceful resistance #Bahrain #KingsTornPics— angry arabiya (@angryarabiya) Oct. 17, 2012"

"When they thought he was a Palestinian Arab, he was labelled a “terrorist,” and then soon as they realized he was an Israeli Jew, the label was instantly withdrawn for that reason alone, even though the conduct was the same. That’s the manipulative, malleable concept of “terrorism” in a nutshell. As Rudy Giuliani put it in 2007 when asked whether waterboarding was torture: “It depends on who does it.” " (thanks Amir)

In fact, the new factor about the rhetoric between Iran and Saudi Arabia is that Iran has only recently dished out but only after the tragedy of Mina. Saudi media have been talking about Ahwaz for many years now, and Al-Arabiyyah has aired reports about it before.

"Russian President Vladimir Putin said his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad had told him he was ready to talk to armed opposition groups if they are genuinely committed to dialogue and to combating Islamic State." But readers of Anne Barnard in the Times remember that she wrote many times that for both Putin and Asad, every opponent of the regime is referred to as terrorist?

Regarding the trash Nazi-absolving talk of Netanyahu, I went yesterday and searched the record of Palestinian political literature from the times of Hajj Amin Husayni, and this question comes to mind: if Hajj Amin was the man who inspired Hitler on the Final Solution, how come he never expressed such genocidal anti-Semitic views in Arabic when addressing his own audiences. His remarks about Jewish people were always centered on the Palestinian situation and did not veer toward the Nazi evil conception on the matter. This man struck a terrible marriage of convenience with the Nazi regime because he was like the revisionist Zionists who saw the evil of the British government to be worse than the evil of the Nazi regime. For Hajj Amin, the British were his worse enemies. He rendered some propaganda services and received some stipend for his entourage from Germany, and he received a nice Mercedes (I saw it with my own eyes at the garage of his daughter in Beirut in late 1970s). Here, an Arab journalist who interviewed Hajj Amin refutes Netanyahu's claims and delivers the words of Hajj Amin regarding the Zionist accusations against him. Don't get me wrong: he was a terrible and dumb Palestinian leader but certainly less dumb and terrible than Mahmoud Abbas.

"The Washington Post: What drives the Palestinians who attack Jews with kitchen knives?". They make it sound as if the Palestinians are attacking Israelis just because they are Jewish. It just happened that those who came from Europe to settle in an already inhabited homeland happened to be Jewish. What do you want the Palestinians to do? You want them to go and find members of another faith in Palestine to attack because if their victims happen to be Jewish dumb and sinister Western reporters will think that the only reason Palestinians defend themselves against Israeli occupiers is because they happen not to be Jewish?? Do you really think that if the Zionist movement comprised only of Catholics the Palestinians would not have minded and would have welcomed the theft of their homeland by them?

"The violence in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is horrific, and overwhelmingly the victims of it have been Palestinian. To focus on the violence done to Israelis by Palestinians to the near exclusion of Israeli violence against Palestinians is a grotesque distortion of journalism."

"a secretive unit known as Task Force 48-4 carried out a shadow war in the region. The task force, with its headquarters at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, operated from outposts in Nairobi, Kenya, and Sanaa, Yemen. The aircraft it used — manned and remotely piloted — were based out of airfields in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, as well as ships off the coast of East Africa." "Predator drones have also been based in the cities of Niamey in Niger and N’Djamena in Chad, while Reaper drones have been flown out of Seychelles International Airport." "Since 9/11, a multitude of other facilities — including staging areas, cooperative security locations and forward operating locations — have also popped up (or been beefed up) in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, South Sudan, and Uganda. A 2011 report by Lauren Ploch, an analyst in African affairs with the Congressional Research Service, also mentioned U.S. military access to locations in Botswana, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, and Zambia."

Comic by Terry Furry, reproduced from "Heard the One About the Funny Leftist?" by Cris Thompson, East Bay Express

As'ad's Bio

As'ad AbuKhalil, born March 16, 1960. From Tyre, Lebanon, grew up in Beirut. Received his BA and MA from American University of Beirut in pol sc. Came to US in 1983 and received his PhD in comparative government from Georgetown University. Taught at Tufts University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Colorado College, and Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Served as a Scholar-in-Residence at Middle East Institute in Washington DC. He served as free-lance Middle East consultant for NBC News and ABC News, an experience that only served to increase his disdain for maintream US media. He is now professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. His favorite food is fried eggplants.

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